A trash-for-benefit card is a card that trashes other cards, then gives you a benefit based on the cost of the trashed card or cards.

This excludes cards like Spice Merchant, Forager, and Trade Route. All of these cards trash cards, and they all give some benefit, but the benefit isn't tied to the cost of the card.

Why do I bother making this distinction? All trash-for-benefits that care about cost hit upon the same concept: the idea of stored value. I believe MicQ was the first to coin this term. It's a pretty simple principle: whenever you buy a card, you "store" the money spent that turn into the card you bought. You can later "cash-in" that value with a trash-for-benefit card.

Once you start thinking in terms of cost, you can derive several synergies.

Trash-for-benefit + on-gain cards: The cost of some cards is tied to their on-buy or on-gain effects. Border Village and Farmland are classic examples, and Skulk is a more recent example. Once you've gained the card, you've already gotten a lot of the value, so feeding those cards to a trash-for-benefit lets you cash-in more value than a typical card of that cost.

Trash-for-benefit + cards that get worse over time: Spice Merchant is a good opener, but gets worse as you run low on Coppers to trash. Witch is a good card, but once the Curses are gone, it's just a Moat. A trash-for-benefit card can let you get rid of the Spice Merchant or Witch after it's done most of what you wanted it to do.

One of my favorite synergies is Butcher + Spice Merchant. Normally, you don't buy that many Spice Merchants because they quickly run out of treasures to trash. Butcher lets you buy more Spice Merchants because you know you'll be able to cash in your extra Spice Merchants once your deck is thin.

Trash-for-benefit + cards that gain other cards: Magpie lets you gain a ton of Magpies, but from a trash-for-benefit perspective, it's more important that it gains you a bunch of $4 costs. Rats is similar - it converts junk cards in your deck into junk that costs $4. That isn't great, unless you have something that cares about the cost of cards, like a trash-for-benefit...and then suddenly it's ridiculous. Port gives you two $4 costs per buy.

Often, treasure gainers let you gain high-cost cards for less than their true cost. Think how Bandit (a $5 cost) gains you Gold (a $6 cost) every time you play. Treasure gainers can do this because treasures are usually worse than Actions, but this opens up neat lines of play if you can feed the treasure-gain to a trash-for-benefit.

A final note: it's usually not worth going too far out of your way for these trash-for-benefit synergies. One of the big newbie mistakes is to believe that you should always spend all your money each turn. This is still a mistake, even when trash-for-benefits are in play. The one exception is when you have a very consistent engine, and it's very important to have a card of a specific cost. The last example I can think of is an old game where Procession, Adventurer, and King's Court were in the Kingdom. On that board, I definitely Processed Adventurer a few times to gain King's Court. But that was very much the exception, and not the norm. More commonly, you add these trash-for-benefit synergies to an existing strategy, and let those synergies nudge you in the direction of buying extra Spice Merchants, or knowing you can buy something other than Gold because you're going to Remodel Witch into Gold. Not enough to sustain a deck by itself, but certainly enough to make an existing deck better.

It should probably also mention Lurker - not for the trashing effect - but the other one that says "hey did you just trash an expensive action to get something better? would you like to have it back, basically for free?"

Actually, neither the Trashing page neither the Lurker page on the dominion wiki mentions the other further than the sentiment that Lurker trashes. It overlooks the complexity that with Lurker in play, the trash pile is also a shared value store for both players. I might add a vague note about that.

Ah, you have a slightly different definition of trash-for-benefit from me. (Although the only cards that come into my categorization and not yours are, I think, Transmute and Counterfeit.)

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17368.0

Just, out of curiosity, why does everything has to have some kind of special name?

I would think, that the majority would understand, if someone says "it's a village (variant)" "it's a remodel (variant)", while adding "but it does this or that in a different way" if it is necessary for the context.

If the term "village variant" is too narrow (leaving too many variants out) then you will, more or less, happen to have for every dominion card an own term, which adds no benefit. In the contrary: calling the actual card village a splitter just adds more complexity.i can say village is a village and so is port. but i don't have to learn, what a splitter is.i even think, that if i use "village" or made-up stuff like "action gainer" or "card-shaped stuffy which lets me do more stuff in my action phase" - the majority will understand.if, in the context, it is important to differentiate between the card "village" and "throne room", someone will call it "throny" "throne room variant" etc. ppa little bit like gernes of music: people may understand the difference between pop, rock, metal etc. ppbut the fewest can know the correct difference between thrash metal and speed metal - its easier to just call the band Metallica or Aerosmith or whatever ... with that: knowing what a splitter is, is just interesting for people, deep enough in the knowing about dominion, which also tends to know the fine and subtle differences between village or fishing village or throne room or summon ... (list exemplary but not limited to these 4)

again - just out of curiosity. I am reading every second day in this forum more or less all the new posts - but these "how do you call a village" topics always keep me puzzled and never have gained me any insights ... (more than reading that f.i. expand is like the bigger brother of remodel, but the rest is quite similar and with that, the cards behave similar, depending of the kingdom...)

Ah, you have a slightly different definition of trash-for-benefit from me. (Although the only cards that come into my categorization and not yours are, I think, Transmute and Counterfeit.)

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17368.0

Just, out of curiosity, why does everything has to have some kind of special name?

I would think, that the majority would understand, if someone says "it's a village (variant)" "it's a remodel (variant)", while adding "but it does this or that in a different way" if it is necessary for the context.

If the term "village variant" is too narrow (leaving too many variants out) then you will, more or less, happen to have for every dominion card an own term, which adds no benefit. In the contrary: calling the actual card village a splitter just adds more complexity.i can say village is a village and so is port. but i don't have to learn, what a splitter is.i even think, that if i use "village" or made-up stuff like "action gainer" or "card-shaped stuffy which lets me do more stuff in my action phase" - the majority will understand.if, in the context, it is important to differentiate between the card "village" and "throne room", someone will call it "throny" "throne room variant" etc. ppa little bit like gernes of music: people may understand the difference between pop, rock, metal etc. ppbut the fewest can know the correct difference between thrash metal and speed metal - its easier to just call the band Metallica or Aerosmith or whatever ... with that: knowing what a splitter is, is just interesting for people, deep enough in the knowing about dominion, which also tends to know the fine and subtle differences between village or fishing village or throne room or summon ... (list exemplary but not limited to these 4)

again - just out of curiosity. I am reading every second day in this forum more or less all the new posts - but these "how do you call a village" topics always keep me puzzled and never have gained me any insights ... (more than reading that f.i. expand is like the bigger brother of remodel, but the rest is quite similar and with that, the cards behave similar, depending of the kingdom...)

on the other side, i like smugglers - what do i know?! :-D

I don't care what the name is. You can call them villages, splitters, +actions, tacos, bananas, or you can call them anti-terminals like I do. What matters is the subset of cards that you are thinking of when you use any of these terms, and it's very important that cards like Summon, King's Court and Champion are included in that subset. To use your metal metaphor, saying that Summon isn't a village is like saying (https://www.metal-archives.com/content/rules) that Slipknot, Between the Buried and Me, Last Days of Humanity, Rammstein, Periphery, and a ton of other metal bands aren't metal because reasons — it might be a comfortable position for some to take, but it's complete nonsense for any practical purposes.

Ah, you have a slightly different definition of trash-for-benefit from me. (Although the only cards that come into my categorization and not yours are, I think, Transmute and Counterfeit.)

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17368.0

Just, out of curiosity, why does everything has to have some kind of special name?

I would think, that the majority would understand, if someone says "it's a village (variant)" "it's a remodel (variant)", while adding "but it does this or that in a different way" if it is necessary for the context.

If the term "village variant" is too narrow (leaving too many variants out) then you will, more or less, happen to have for every dominion card an own term, which adds no benefit. In the contrary: calling the actual card village a splitter just adds more complexity.i can say village is a village and so is port. but i don't have to learn, what a splitter is.i even think, that if i use "village" or made-up stuff like "action gainer" or "card-shaped stuffy which lets me do more stuff in my action phase" - the majority will understand.if, in the context, it is important to differentiate between the card "village" and "throne room", someone will call it "throny" "throne room variant" etc. ppa little bit like gernes of music: people may understand the difference between pop, rock, metal etc. ppbut the fewest can know the correct difference between thrash metal and speed metal - its easier to just call the band Metallica or Aerosmith or whatever ... with that: knowing what a splitter is, is just interesting for people, deep enough in the knowing about dominion, which also tends to know the fine and subtle differences between village or fishing village or throne room or summon ... (list exemplary but not limited to these 4)

again - just out of curiosity. I am reading every second day in this forum more or less all the new posts - but these "how do you call a village" topics always keep me puzzled and never have gained me any insights ... (more than reading that f.i. expand is like the bigger brother of remodel, but the rest is quite similar and with that, the cards behave similar, depending of the kingdom...)

on the other side, i like smugglers - what do i know?! :-D

I don't care what the name is. You can call them villages, splitters, +actions, tacos, bananas, or you can call them anti-terminals like I do. What matters is the subset of cards that you are thinking of when you use any of these terms, and it's very important that cards like Summon, King's Court and Champion are included in that subset. To use your metal metaphor, saying that Summon isn't a village is like saying (https://www.metal-archives.com/content/rules) that Slipknot, Between the Buried and Me, Last Days of Humanity, Rammstein, Periphery, and a ton of other metal bands aren't metal because reasons — it might be a comfortable position for some to take, but it's complete nonsense for any practical purposes.

I guess the lesson to be had with that metal archive is that you shouldn't let other people tell you how to classify stuff.

I don't care what the name is. You can call them villages, splitters, +actions, tacos, bananas, or you can call them anti-terminals like I do. What matters is the subset of cards that you are thinking of when you use any of these terms, and it's very important that cards like Summon, King's Court and Champion are included in that subset. To use your metal metaphor, saying that Summon isn't a village is like saying (https://www.metal-archives.com/content/rules) that Slipknot, Between the Buried and Me, Last Days of Humanity, Rammstein, Periphery, and a ton of other metal bands aren't metal because reasons — it might be a comfortable position for some to take, but it's complete nonsense for any practical purposes.

Why should I include a one-shot ... or a Throny, when i want to talk about spamable villages?! there are huge differences, actual practical differencesits not about the term, but how some believe that this-or-that needs to be in this "loose group" - and that's what i find is arbitraryyou draw the line there, i here

I don't care what the name is. You can call them villages, splitters, +actions, tacos, bananas, or you can call them anti-terminals like I do. What matters is the subset of cards that you are thinking of when you use any of these terms, and it's very important that cards like Summon, King's Court and Champion are included in that subset. To use your metal metaphor, saying that Summon isn't a village is like saying (https://www.metal-archives.com/content/rules) that Slipknot, Between the Buried and Me, Last Days of Humanity, Rammstein, Periphery, and a ton of other metal bands aren't metal because reasons — it might be a comfortable position for some to take, but it's complete nonsense for any practical purposes.

Why should I include a one-shot ... or a Throny, when i want to talk about spamable villages?! there are huge differences, actual practical differencesits not about the term, but how some believe that this-or-that needs to be in this "loose group" - and that's what i find is arbitraryyou draw the line there, i here

Because those are the cards that let you play more than one terminal per turn. If you're going for a non-engine strategy when it's an engine board just because "there are no villages" and there's KC, you're playing the game wrong and will lose games because of it.

I don't care what the name is. You can call them villages, splitters, +actions, tacos, bananas, or you can call them anti-terminals like I do. What matters is the subset of cards that you are thinking of when you use any of these terms, and it's very important that cards like Summon, King's Court and Champion are included in that subset. To use your metal metaphor, saying that Summon isn't a village is like saying (https://www.metal-archives.com/content/rules) that Slipknot, Between the Buried and Me, Last Days of Humanity, Rammstein, Periphery, and a ton of other metal bands aren't metal because reasons — it might be a comfortable position for some to take, but it's complete nonsense for any practical purposes.

Why should I include a one-shot ... or a Throny, when i want to talk about spamable villages?! there are huge differences, actual practical differencesits not about the term, but how some believe that this-or-that needs to be in this "loose group" - and that's what i find is arbitraryyou draw the line there, i here

Because those are the cards that let you play more than one terminal per turn. If you're going for a non-engine strategy when it's an engine board just because "there are no villages" and there's KC, you're playing the game wrong and will lose games because of it.